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Artists and scientists see bullseyes differently but bullseyes they do see! It’s just the when and the how…
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April 13 2023 karaoke night on Main leads to the thesis... published here as a SoundCloud playlist and corresponding Soundtrap project links on June 6, 2024. Details to follow… but at just under double o’seven hours of runtime, I’m willing to defends this thesis as a remarkable innovation in McLuhanian rhetoric while it having completely defeated me in the process! Only took me 25 years, but hey, lifelong lessons or something like that in the academic business 🤷🏻‍♂️

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Twenty-five years ago… a mid-20s UBC Commerce grad named Joel Flynn leaves his 10-year college job at a grocery store in Campbell River BC and returns to Vancouver to begin what would turn into a 25-year digital media research career. The first stop in this academic research path was the British Columbia Institute to Technology (BCIT) and its brand new New Media Design program at the downtown campus. At the time, Flynn had just recorded a 5-song demo as the singer for a Vancouver Island indie band named “Halcyon Days”, and by the end of 1999 the rest of the band had moved to Vancouver, also to start school at BCIT and SFU.

Inspired by DIY “indie” artists (e.g. Swell, GBV), Flynn pushed his band as early adopters of Apple Macintosh CD burners in order to create packaged CD-Rs with artwork for selling at the band’s gigs. The very first project Flynn would work on at BCIT was a “remix” of the band’s five demo songs along with key audio samples - from films, soundtracks, and other songs - in order to create a cohesive 25-minute album listening experience. While incorporating a sampled monolog from the William Hurt film Altered States, the joke at the time was, “who the hell decides to make Dark Side of the Moon out of a 5-song demo tape? Ha! It’s Halcyon Days!” The band would play what proved to be its final show on March 10, 2000 at the legendary Commodore Ballroom, before then “taking a break” just as the dot.com bubble altered its state.

Flynn’s interest new media has always reflected his interests in music, particularly in live music through his skills as a singer and performer. These were just starting to develop in 1999 as lead singer/songwriter in “the Halcyon Days Project”, a version of the band name that refers to 1999’s videotape “found footage” cult classic The Blair Witch Project. Flynn has long been fixated on the historical development of media formats, especially the shift from physical albums on vinyl and cassette, to digital versions on computers through “ripped” CDs and mp3s.  Flynn’s investigation into digital media authoring tools - i.e. digital audio workstations (DAW) such as ProTools and Logic for “remixing” audio content - began in the BCIT New Media Design program in 1999. Twenty-five years later, his media research path has led to an unprecedented amount of remixed audio content for a Master of Applied Science and MBA from SFU. It's now his PhD research at Carleton U, distilled via Podstream Studios...

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"a dissertation is a long piece of writing on a particular subject, especially one that is done in order to receive a degree at college or university"

HAVE A LISTEN! Sure it's SEVEN hours long, but for all the advanced arguments contained within this *authored/written* piece of academic work, that's pretty economical! :)

PODSTREAM DISTILLED: Thesis/Antithesis/Playlist, a dissertation by George Crooney - June 21st, 2024

OLD ADVENTURES IN LO-FI... 

Next to a small little cobblestone street on the edge of Vancouver's Gastown used to be a bunch of rehearsal spaces for local bands, with all the aesthetics, trappings, and varmints of a set from David Fincher's Fight Club. Matt Wilson, the ex-bassist from from late 90s Campbell River rock band halcyon days had a shared room here with his other band and in late 2008 suggested to former bandmates Joel Flynn (vocals, acoustic guitar) and Derek Lee (drums) to come on by and make use of the space. After the sudden passing of Flynn's father in December of that year, the ex-Riverite singer needed some music to work through the situation. He recruited two other ex-Riverites, his nephew Luke Schuss on guitar and Erin Lahay on piano/keyboards. 

To honour the infamous old singing fisherman - Flynn's father Doug, who had moved on to Fiddler's Green - the five-piece put together a bunch of mostly Irish-themed songs to play at a St. Patrick's Day memorial at the Media Club. The nameless group continued to get together and learn songs, some new originals and holdovers from the halcyon days era, but mostly just a bunch of cover songs that were fun to play. Borrowing Flynn's nom-de-plume of that he used for his digital media art experiments, the band played one other show at the Media Club in July of 2009, but never did anything else outside the walls and microphones of, ahem, "Cobblestone Road Studios". 

Of course, "studios" is saying a bit much, as it is basically a 15'x15' room with some randomly placed microphones. These consisted of either a Rode Podcaster or an iPod nano with a Belkin stereo mic attachment, which were later thrown together into multitrack Garageband projects. Yet this bare minimal approach did the lo-fi job and the Campbell River collective continued to play away in the space until it was closed down in early 2010. Some informal recording took place during this time, but was more note-taking and reference material for the band members than anything else. 

Later in the year, while backing up all these recordings to a new hard drive, Flynn ended up losing most of them when the brand new drive crashed within a  week (damn you LaCie!). File recovery software couldn't identify the Garageband files, and the old "throw the drive in the freezer" last resort couldn't get the drive spinning. The still nameless band never ended up finding another full rehearsal space, or play another show as a full band, while the lost Garageband recordings are still sitting unrecoverable on the busted LaCie (with the eye-catching design by Porsche). 

FAST FORWARD: While rummaging through discs, drives, and other piled up office stuff in early 2011, Flynn came across an old recovery disc from the busted LaCie drive. On it were some raw and rough mp3s taken during the group's rehearsals in 2009 that he gave a listen. With Erin now on a two-year 'round the world adventure, and the rest of the band still in limbo with other projects and a lack of a regular rehearsal space, Flynn decided to collect and coordinate some of these lo-fi recordings through a SoundCloud page, which has now been repurposed for Podstream Studio's uses.